The Open Archives Initiative and Digital
Libraries

These pages introduce the OAI and
supply a brief history of the DLF's
involvement with it. The DLF is also evaluating the OAI's
technical framework by developing a number of Internet gateways
that integrate access to distributed digital library collections.
An account of those evaluation projects is available by clicking
here.

The OAI has developed a technical framework for facilitating
the efficient dissemination of content via the network. One very
obvious use is in the development of Internet gateways through
which users can search simultaneously across diverse and
geographically distributed online catalogues, finding aids, and
other metadata databases.

The OAI framework is based on an approach known as metadata
harvesting. In this approach, there are data providers and
service providers. Data providers (such as individual libraries,
museums, archives, data services, and e-print archives) support a
simple harvesting protocol to provide extracts of local metadata
in a common, minimal-level format in response to requests from
service providers. Service providers use extracted metadata to
build higher level, user-oriented services, such as catalogs and
portals to materials that are distributed across multiple
libraries, museums, archives, and other repositories.

The OAI has its genesis in an October 1999 meeting held in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the sponsorship of the Council on
Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the DLF, the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, the Association of
Research Libraries, and the Research Library of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. Focusing on the interoperation of "e-print
archives" (collections of electronic journal articles and
preprints), the OAi developed the harvesting approach and its
protocols and documented these in the "Santa Fe Convention,"
along with preliminary ideas about acceptable use policies,
registries, and other issues.

Almost immediately upon its publication, the Santa Fe
Convention attracted considerable interest from libraries,
publishers, museums associations, and other bodies who saw
significant potential benefits in metadata harvesting. A meeting
of the Digital Library Federation convened by Harvard University
in May 2000 with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
for example, expressed its hope that the Santa Fe Convention
would support the development of Internet gateways or portal
services through which users could access information about
library holdings irrespective of their location and format. This
interest is expressed in a vision
statement prepared after the Harvard meetings.

The second OAI workshop, held in conjunction with the ACM
Digital Libraries meeting in San Antonio in June 2000, reviewed
early implementation experience with the Santa Fe Convention and
the interests in generalizing it to support the needs of a
broader community of information providers. Out of that meeting
came a consensus that the Santa Fe Convention needed to be
revised and updated with the intent of producing a new more
general version by January 2001. The meeting also accepted the
need for some very limited organizational support for the OAI
which had hitherto run entirely on the voluntary effort of a
small number of dedicated individuals.

In August an OAI
Steering Committee was established to oversee the OAI's
development. The Committee convened a technical working group
that met in September 2000 to revise the Santa Fe Convention. It
also agreed that the convention, once revised, should be fixed
for a period of one or two years, and that any further technical
work be based on any implementation experience gained during that
time. The Committee finally agreed to establish some
organizational support for the initiative, and with funding from
the DLF and the Coalition for Networked Information, that support
was located at the Computing Science Department of Cornell
University.

At present, the OAI has revised its technical framework
(renamed the OAI harvesting protocol) and is encouraging
practical evaluation, notably in the development of prototype
harvesting services. The DLF is actively involved in this
evaluation activity and is focusing its efforts on the
development of services built with metadata that are harvested
primarily from library systems. More information about the DLF
evaluation projects is availably by clicking here.